Guardians Season Preview: Will this finally be the year? You never know

Is this it? Is this the year for you know what? The year we have been waiting for far too long? That's the way it goes sometimes, you know. An otherwise nondescript team that is minding its own business, diligently keeping its collective nose to the grindstone, day in, day out, month in, month out. Your basic, "nothing to see here, folks!" level of innocent, generic scrutiny, without calling any attention to itself, suddenly, out of nowhere, emerges as a franchise of interest. And then, if they are lucky: "BOOM!" Followed by the inevitable "Where did that come from?" It's a scenario as old as the game itself. Because when it comes to professional sports, one never knows what one doesn't know. Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes it doesn't. That's the fun of it. Not frequently, mind you. But also not never. That's the beauty of sports. Stuff happens all the time, both good and bad, especially in professional sports. It's a two-way street, but that's what makes it so interesting. Our job, as sports fans, is to pay attention, so we don't miss anything. In that regard, Cleveland sports fans are lucky. We don't miss much in these parts because there is not much to miss. Our city has not won the World Series since 1948. Our city has never won the Super Bowl, nor even played in it! And Cleveland hasn't won the NBA Championship since Nae'Qwan Tomlin was 15 years old. Haven't Cleveland fans suffered enough? Of course, we have. In Cleveland, it comes with the turf. It's for that reason that we care about sports, because you never know what the next chapter will bring, and how aggravating, or exciting, it will be. We need only to go back to last season, when the Guardians initially appeared to be pretty good, until they stopped looking good in the middle of the season, and then got really good again near the end of the season. Remember? In the middle of the year they went into a slump. They lost 10 games in a row, tumbling all the way to fourth in the AL Central — nobody was dropping below the White Sox. It got worse than worse. In June they played 25 games, lost all but nine of them and were outscored 101-72. July was no picnic, either, as the Guards were mired in the 10-game losing streak. They trailed in the division by 15.5 games. But the plucky Guardians never quit. In the final month of the regular season, the Guards went nuclear. They caught and passed the Tigers, eventually beating the team from Detroit for the title. From start to finish the Guardians produced a magnificent run through the division race between the Great Lakes rivals. In July, August and September, it was go time for the Guardians. Cleveland went, and the Tigers didn't. It was as simple as that. Detroit's powerhouse couldn't keep up with Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt's rampaging gamers, and in the last three months of the season the Guardians out-Tigered the Tigers. In the process, the Guardians barreled through a Detroit team that, for most of the season, appeared to have a lock on the AL Central Division, if not on the entire American League. The other teams in the AL Central simply ran out of gas while trying to keep up with the G-Men's scintillating surge that produced a finishing kick nobody saw coming. For much of the season — roughly two-thirds of it — the Guardians had trouble just keeping up with their hardball rivals from Michigan. But the Guards, surprisingly and amazingly, kept winning games, reaching 88 victories. For Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt, on his way to his second AL Manager of the Year Award in two years, it was a tour de force in the art of leadership. In only his second year on the job, Vogt artfully set the course on how not to panic while leading the way through a nerve-wracking, late-season baseball jungle between the two best teams in the Central. When the dust finally settled, Vogt's steadying hand won the division with a record of 88-74, while the Tigers clinched the wild card with a record of 87-75. Cleveland's loss to the Tigers in the Wild Card Series followed, but not without tacit acknowledgement that the Guardians had turned a major corner in franchise history. Whether the franchise improves upon last year's electric finish will be determined this year. But if the Guardians, and the franchise itself, learned anything from last year, it's the value of waiting till next year. Welcome to the waiting room. The doctor will see you in about six months. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com.